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Forgery that was passport to a colourful life
TO the regular patrons at the Charlie Ratchford Day Centre in Chalk Farm, she would have seemed just as she looked, very elderly, frail, hard of hearing, but full of humour.
But Angela Szentirmay, who has died at 92, had lived a colourful life that would have surprised them.
Born in Budapest in Hungary, a few weeks before the start of World War I in 1914, Angela lived in a comfortable middle-class family. But after her mother died she realised her father, a high-ranking policeman, had only one destiny for her – marriage. A determined woman, she wanted more, so she answered a London agency’s advert for maids, and ended up with a family in the Midlands. To leave Budapest she forged her father’s signature on her passport.
She planned to learn English and return home but the start of World War II ended her dreams.
In her spare time she helped out at a local hospital and later moved to London, where she did similar work at a Bethnal Green hospital.
Once in the Blitz she opened the door of a ward with a cup of tea for a patient when a bomb hit the hospital, leaving her standing in the doorway of a ward that had disappeared in a cloud of dust. Remarkably, the cup of tea remained standing in the saucer.
After the war she returned to a Budapest that lay in ruins and found that her beloved brother Tibor had died in a prisoner-of-war camp.
Returning to England, she trained as a nurse, met a student from Ghana whom she married, and then had a daughter. But when her husband returned to Ghana she was left to bring up her baby in the 50s – a time when a single parent, without any support, was frowned upon.
She was also often up against the fact that she was a foreigner, but feisty Angela became known for her outspokenness and would not let anyone talk down to her.
Later, she qualified as a midwife and became a popular ward sister at a Plymouth hospital, where she delivered more than 1,000 babies. Neighbours simply knew her as “Nurse”.
Often, she would rush to a house to make an emergency delivery, and then would emerge and hold the baby up in triumph to loud cheers from neighbours who had gathered on the pavement.
In the 80s she moved to London, later to a sheltered home in Hampstead.
I had known Angela, a relative, for more than 20 years and had always thought of her as someone who had had a hard life.
But this week I opened one of her photo albums for the first time, and it was like the curtain opening on a new, happy and vivacious Angela.
There she was with her handsome brother in Budapest, dressed like a film star in the early 30s, and then young, attractive, full of flirtatious smiles, with her patients at a hospital in Devon, all men, snappily dressed 50s-style. And there she was too in seaside snaps with her daughter and laughing neighbours.
It shows you cannot measure someone by the last few years of their life but only by their full measure.
Angela’s funeral takes place at the East Chapel, Golders Green crematorium on Tuesday at 2.15pm.
JOHN GULLIVER |
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